The Iranian Revolution of 1979 reshaped the political landscape of the Middle East, replacing Iran’s Western-backed leader with an Islamic Republic. It transformed modern political extremism. Now, more than 40 years later, the Israeli–US attacks have killed the country’s supreme leader, creating the possibility of regime change. It reminds us these fault lines are far from settled.

In his riveting new book The Revolutionists, Guardian international security correspondent Jason Burke treats the Iranian Revolution as a catalyst for “a new and different energy” that would surge through the Middle East. In its aftermath, he argues, religious extremism accelerated across the Islamic world. Older, leftist revolutionary currents were pushed to the margins.

Review: The Revolutionists by Jason Burke (Bodley Head)

Among those currents was the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). Its most recognisable face, Leila Khaled, participated in two aircraft hijackings, an activity pioneered by Palestinian militants at the end of the 1960s to draw global attention to their cause. Today, of course, that cause is on the world stage again.

Another current was the Organization of Iranian People’s Fedai Guerrillas, which fought the Iranian regime from within from 1971 to 1979. It was part of a broad coalition, spanning left-wing radicals and right-wing religious extremists, that supported the revolution. Key member Hamid Ashraf, shot dead a few years before the shah’s fall, had become an “obsession” to Iran’s leader, due to his track record in avoiding ambushes and his long survival under intense persecution.

Burke digs into the history of both kinds of extremism. For him, they are not discrete eruptions, but successive phases of what he describes as “a broader revolutionary moment”.

He profiles many of the 1970s’ most high-profile terrorists, operatives and ideologues, unpicking the myths and legends surrounding them. They include Khaled, Ashraf, Venezuelan leftist militant Ilich Ramírez Sánchez (better known as Carlos the Jackal), West Germany’s radical left Rote Armee Fraktion (RAF) and members of the Japanese Red Army. It’s a fresh, richly detailed portrait of a pivotal decade.

But Burke’s project is not simply to revise the biographies of a handful of notorious characters. He also reconstructs the vast transnational ecosystem they operated in. Drawn from across continents and ideologies, his subjects are united less by doctrine than a shared conviction that existing power structures could be overturned by force. Ideological struggle and international militancy fused into new and troubling configurations.

Burke’s sweeping transnational account of political zealotry moves across four continents and more than two dozen countries. It follows radicals from remarkably varied social worlds: students and dropouts, refugees and aristocrats, opportunists and hired killers.........

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